AMD’s 12-Core Microprocessors Available

Oakville Mehlville Computers, a maker of custom servers and workstations from Missouri, has started to sell twelve-core AMD Opteron 6174 microprocessors for servers at an Ebay auction. The chips are not officially launched yet, even though the processors do not look like engineering samples and may belong to the first mass-production batch of twelve-core chips.

The manufacturer of custom high-end machines sells a set of four AMD Opteron 6174 microprocessors with 2.20GHz clock-speed, 12MB of unified level-three cache and 6MB level-two cache (512KB of cache per core). The central processing units code-named Magny-Cours have quad-channel PC3-10600 (DDR3 1333MHz) memory controller and are designed for socket G34 platform.

The starting bid for the set of four tray microprocessors is $6500, the seller may also sell the central processing units for a total price of $8000 immediately. The seller does not offer an actual mainboard or cooling systems for the chips separately, hence, for the vast majority of potential buyers the chips will be useless, it is even impossible to test whether they work, a not very good thing since no returns are accepted. Interestingly, but Oakville Mehlville Computers also offers complete 48-core server running AMD’s twelve-core microprocessors for $20000.

Considering the fact that the microprocessors carry their official model number and marking, it is possible that those chips are not evaluation or development samples, but are the chips produced by AMD in mass quantities using 45nm SOI fabrication process. When asked for a comment whether the company has already started to ship its next-gen server microprocessors for revenue, AMD decided not to comment on the matter, but to re-emphasize the commitment to start their shipments in Q1 2010.

“What I can confirm for you at this point is that Magny-Cours is on track to launch in the current quarter,” said Phil Hughes, a spokesperson for AMD.